Post navigation

Fine-Tuning, Atheism, and the Mind

Does your favourite interpretation of quantum mechanics or apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants provide evidence for or against a divine creator? Deeply religious people know better than to leave something so important to them to fads in physics. And when people do engage in these debates, they seem to find a reason to believe what they want to believe, regardless of how the science unfolds.More.

Rubbish. Fine-tuning is the most obvious fact of the universe and efforts to undermine the evidence for it have driven crackpot cosmology for decades. The crackpots now turn on the very idea of evidence to protect their position.

First, no one cares what Dr. Albrecht finds “deeply unsatisfying”; he can find himself another universe if he likes, and take his fads in physics with him.

Second, “deeply religious people” feel constrained by facts, evidence, and truthfulness, not by the view—attractive to so many Darwinian atheists—that “evolution” bred a sense of reality out of us.

God’s people are under obligation not to lie.

When they stop looking for ways to shirk their responsibilities and instead turn to expanding their understanding and dominion over their environment, as God commands, they will — with ease — outshine your self-aggrandizing secularist, ever in search of tenure and safety.

The choice matters to science and we fear we know which one most of them have made.

By the way, why are atheists so solicitous about theists who, they fear, will lose their faith?

Those howls of laughter you are hearing about ‘solicitous atheists’ are coming from the fabric of reality itself… if not directly from Heaven.

The reality is that the only faith many of us are rapidly losing is in government of science by atheists. Take the unstoppable crises of peer review, for example.

Why are we better off with science’s affairs run by people who believe that if they win they survive and that none of us evolved so as to grasp reality anyway?

The lawless naturally dissolve into meaninglessness, and then powerlessness.

I don’t see how you can be devoted to fighting for science against religiously-driven pseudoscience, and think that this book [A Big Bang in a Little Room – AP] is one you’d like to see be the public face of what “modern ideas” about cosmology are. More.

But what is the solution? If they give up all the nonsense, they must face fine-tuning as a fact. There is no use blaming “religion” or “Templeton” or even the crackpot cosmologists who make a living off fronting weird new stuff.

No, from the point of view of naturalist atheism, the facts are wrong. Worse, a new shipment of authentic facts that supports the multiverse cosmology that would save them seems to be unaccountably delayed in transit (in this universe). And humans here did not evolve to perceive reality anyway.

It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself.

[…]

Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. Regardless of the direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems just as likely that the opposite will be the case. More.

No surprise. The way these elegant essays work: One is allowed to wring one’s hands politely over the distressing state of affairs as long as one does not address serious alternatives, except to rule them offside.

The games will end, probably with this generation. Too much information leakage, not enough centralized carrots and sticks.

Okay, the problem awaits those who can even afford to address it and are not required by the demands of their position to come up with something that sounds ridiculous but not heretical.